Optimising Wireless for SL

Yes, I know I know! Wireless is not recommended for SL, dump it and get landline (see Wiki help section on the problems below).

It's not that easy though. I have wireless connection provided for me and I don't have the ability to set up a landline where I am. Period.

The trouble is, when it works, it works great. I don't notice a thing, wireless and SL go hand in hand.

When it doesn't work though (like now), I can't log in for days at a time, very frustrating - despite the internet connection being fine and my computer being up to the task. I log in and maybe last ten or twenty seconds before one of the several happen: -

1) I get stuck and can only rotate on the spot

2) I end up continuing a motion ad finitum, flying through walls, and eventually the floor and the ground and into the bowels of the earth

3) it tells me my clothing is still downloading and that to carry on because everyone else will see me normally - except I'm stuck

4) it doesn't load at all

What I wanted to know is why does it work great some times and not at all at others? Is there some way I can configure my wireless settings to make it work well of the time? I really need help because if I can't sort this out, I will have to downgrade my account and effectively leave SL because I can't afford not to be able to log in.

Any expert advice would be appreciated.

Those behaviors you listed above...happened to me with a wired connection. I am using wireless at home for SL and it works better than the wired connection does. Things rez faster and I got less lag. Go figure.

How strange - it's idiosyncratic then? This is really cheesing me off, I haven't been able to log in for over 48 hours in any meaningful way other than to say "hi" and then get stuck. I've tried everything I can think of, changing my log in location to my home instead of the last place, stripping down my settings, teleporting in my little window of opportunity to a low-lag place, stripping my av down to just basic clothing...

NOTHING is working. I thought maybe the update would sort it out, but it's made no difference at all. I'm losing hope and heart

Also chiming in, I use nothing but wifi-g at home and haven't noticed any problems. Perhaps some network testing to see if it's a bandwidth problem from the provider?

Pym

I use SL on a PowerBook with Airport. It makes absolutely no difference to speed if I hard wire an ethernet cable. I've tried it many times. I think the perceived problems with wireless have far more to do with certain types of hardware than they do with the protocol.

I use wired on my PC and wireless on my laptop .. wireless works just fine

There is a mode of WiFi, called type-2 by the 802.11b/g spec that allows out-of-order delivery of frames; this is sometimes called "hyper-mode" or "ultra-mode" or "whizzy-mode" and will kill your SL experience.

Some WAPs and WiFi cards support this, some have it on by default, some kinda hide that they are using whizzy-mode. If you are not running whizzy-mode, your WiFi should do fine, just so long as you have good reception and aren't resending or dropping WiFi frames.

I've run SL over 802.11g (54Mbps) where you couldn't tell that it wasn't on a wire, but neither my WAP nor my WiFi NIC supports whizzy-mode.

Iiinnterreessttingg ! Thank you for that little gem of info I've not really dug into this before, perhaps I should !

Thank you! That is such a useful tip. Actually my WiFi works great normally with SL, but every now and again it crashed bigtime.

I can't find exactly those term, but I suspect "Afterburner" mode to be something like it?

Anyway, I'm disabling now and gonna try it out

"Afterburner" is probably type-2. Good luck with your test.

Wireless works fine for me too; at least, it seems to, not having anything to compare it with really. Maybe I should take the pbook to a net cafe some time and check it out.

Well, it was worth a try...



...didn't make much difference unfortunately.

As for the connection, I did a test and it came back at 206 Kbps (25.8 KB/sec) for downstream and 48 Kbps (6.0 KB/sec) for upstream. Not great, but I have run SL successfully at those speeds before.

Still hoping it will fix itself like it did the last time, but not really that confident that it will happen.

This is incorrect, Afterburner is used with "54G with Speed Booster" which is sold on Broadcom cards, Linksys utilizes it and it runs in a full duplex mode. I switched from 54G to 54G with Speed Booster and my efficiency moved from 35% to 54% which was quite impressive. It has nothing to do with type-2 and if your hardware isn't Speed Booster compatible its just going to be off, no biggie. I really have no issues with SL and wireless, it works just as good as my other computer on a hardwire line.